25 June 2015

Giant clams typically present viewers with a prominent gape, which is enhanced in living animals by a colourful and fleshy mantle filled with photosynthetic zooxanthellae that convert sunlight into energy for themselves and their sedentary host. Prompted perhaps by this benthic visage, German-born soldier-turned-naturalist Georgius Everhardus Rumphius was led to coin, in his parvum opus, The Ambonese Curiosity Cabinet, the binomial Chama Aspera for large shellfish that he encountered, or was presented with, in the town of Hiru on the northern coast of Ambon, where he lived in the latter half of the 17th century.

Chama, explains Rumphius scholar E.M. Beekman, comes from chema, Greek for a "gaping mussel", while aspera means "rough". Today, the former term is attached to heterondont bivalves in the family Chamidae, which in common parlance are known as jewelbox shells. Rumphius' coinage, which arose from his own deliberations and pre-dated modern conchology, denotes Chamae as

"all those Shells which, lying bare on the ground, for the most part gape, and could, therefore, be called Gapers."

He later adds:

"Chametrachea or Chama Aspera, are those that have a rough shell, either through ribs that stick out, or because of scales and nails."

This description would ring a bell for those who are familiar with Southeast Asian reef assemblages as well as the way baselines for shallow-water fauna have shifted over the centuries to render the common rare and erase gaps in the chain of life under the tides. Tridacnines (for the family Tridacnidae is now buried within the true cockles) once occurred in densities that could support littoral populations across the Indian Ocean and Asia-Pacific, and may have persisted as a sustainable fishery in Rumphius' time, when he gave the name Chamasquammata to an ill-defined taxon, known in Ambonese Malay as Bia garu, "that is Scratchers, because one could scratch someone badly with them, or because they scratch the hands, when one handles them." Bia is a broad term for "shell" while garu can mean "harrow" or "rake", a reference perhaps to the toothed fringe of the valves or more possibly to the sharp scutes on the shell's outer surface.

(Rumphius also took pains to distinguish Chamma from what he termed Klipkoussen, a "vulgarism" that combines the Dutch words for "rock" (Klip) and "stocking" (Kous). The great naturalist observed that some contemporaries used the term to refer to snails that we now recognise as cowries, but found some impropriety in it, as Klipkoussen was also applied to female genitalia, and by extension, women. Beekman, who translated Rumphius for a late 20th century audience, chose to render the word as "clack dish", a Shakespearean euphemism that refers to a beggar's bowl for alms but which the Bard employed to refer to a lady's pudendum in Measure for Measure, in which the Duke "put a ducat in her clack-dish".)

(A more sober footnote on etymology comes with Beekman's annotations on the origin of the modern genus for giant clams, which he explains arose from a "funny anecdote" by the elder Pliny "that the name tridacna, from the Greek tris for "three" and daknō "I bite", came about because someone jested that he would like to have the oysters that reputedly came from the 'Indian Sea' because they were so big that they needed three bites to be consumed.")

Rumphius was quick to discern between what he called Pelagiae, "the largest of all Shellfish", which grew to a length of 5 feet and were so bulky that "6 or 8 people have more than enough to carry just one" and were confined to deeper waters, and smaller Littorales, which could be found around beaches. The latter was sexually dimorphic, he added, with the female being

"the most common, its shell is divided into 4 or 5 round ridges that jut out, making deep furrows between both, with sharp edges that are jagged, so that the shell goes up and down like waves, both inside and outside; on the back are large curved scales, very similar to human nails, round and sharp in front, but most of them, especially the old ones, are broken off and damaged."

Male Chamma, on the other hand, were

"more oblong, divided into 9 or 10 ridges, and the scales are closer together, but are shorter than those of the Female, and the opening on the one side is much larger: otherwise it has the same shape."

Beekman has suggested that the male animals may have been Tridacna maxima, a species that exhibits relatively weak vertical folds and close-set, scarcely prominent scutes, and which partially embeds itself into coral rubble and other reef substrates. The females were probably the Tridacna squamosa of modern nomenclature, a giant clam with deeply fluted valves and a formidable array of scutes (scales), which serve in young individuals as an adaptation against predatory crabs and fish. Rumphius may have been sexually confused, but his comments on mature specimens ring true; large giant clams, such as one encountered in repeated surveys of patch reefs near Pulau Semakau, may have shells bereft of their "nails" after years of bites and being rocked against nearby rocks by unruly waves.

Rumphius was also fascinated by the appearance of older Bia garu, which had outer shells that were "very much overgrown with moss, lime, and other sea grit, even with other shells, mussels and coral trees, so that one would hold it to be a rock, rather than a shell." Young specimens, he noted, "are a dirty white on the outside, without luster, inside a yellow-white like ivory."

He was rather less fond of the "Beast that lives within", however, which he found

"dreadful to behold, because if one looks upon one that is gaping, one sees nothing but a taut skin, full of black, white, yellow, and lead-coloured veins, painted like a snake's skin."

Despite this distaste, Rumphius was able to muster enough scientific curiosity to describe morphological features such as the clam's inhalant and exhalant siphons, beard-like "coarse and tough threads" that the animals use to "cling to the rocks so they will not be tossed around", and a thick tendo fastened to both halves of the shell, which is surrounded by a fleshy disk that was judged to be "the best for eating".

Unfortunately, Rumphius was to veer into more outlandish territory in his, almost certainly second-hand, observations of Pelagiae, which he wrote was capable of snapping off anchor ropes and careless limbs, and furthermore, had a predatory bent:

"They gape almost always when on the ground, especially in order to catch the little fishes that come in multitudes to swim and play therein, until all of them together are suddenly locked in there, and come to serve as the Beast's food."

Collaborating with Tridacna gigas in this macabre trap, according to Rumphius, is a

"kind of little Shrimp... which pinches its flesh when it sees that there is a great deal of prey in its house, whereupon the shell snaps shut, and one believes that the Beast cannot live, if that little Pinna Guard happens to be away from it, because the Beast cannot see, and cannot be on guard for robbers."

Rumphius' discourse on Bia garu goes on to cover methods for capture, culinary and organoleptic aspects, local superstitions, and the formation of precious stones, even light-emitting ones, within the gape. Species believed to be Tridacna crocea, which burrows into rock and even concrete, and Hippopusare also discussed, in what is thought to be the first systematic description of living tridacnines, their habits and natural habitats in modern conchology. More than three centuries after his tour of duty in the Spice Islands, Georg Everhard's nocturnal submissions still take no prisoners in their celebration of antiquity, on which the former mercenary heaps a mélange of lore from the Malay archipelago, and his lifelong desire to capture the living treasures of the East Indies and set them loose in an imaginarium of words that draw no line between the material world and the magic of reality.

16 June 2015

There exists a fine line between peril and delight, between a meal that thrills and a mouthful that kills. The world beyond safe sea walls is a minefield of mixed signals, where a bright mark may scream blue murder and a carapace of spines may hide pleasures of softer flesh. Beauty is often skin-deep and razor-sharp on the tidal flats; a bed of blossoms, pinkish rosettes on long, swaying rods, rises from a crown of cruel rock, while starlight beckons with a thousand blinks from columns with a cutting edge and a cold, crude streak. A battery of jaws awaits at segments at the end of a rainbow, and names like "rabbit", "puffer" and "cat" should be trigger warnings rather than an invitation to reach out and rub – hazards to health in the wrong hands with a point to prove.

This fine, florid line, which runs through biological families and respects no natural orders, has long ceased to be of meaning to modern man, who has given up on his senses and surrendered his ability to choose to more profiterole deportments. We have forgotten how to read the clues and colours that glow in the waters, to tell the difference between a fair catch and a foul beast, to distinguish food from fiend. This literacy of life, a skill honed by trial and terror, still survived not an age ago, when the sea fed these shores and taught the inhabitants of the Malay archipelago how to find dinner in its depths, to follow its rhythms and flee from its storms.

People on the Indonesian island of Ambon, a land of spice in a rim of fire, were already seasoned readers of signs and devout wanderers three-and-a-half centuries ago, when Georgius Everhardus Rumphius, a mercenary-turned-merchant arrived to rue by day and undertake a lifetime of research by candlelight. German-born but Dutch at heart, Rumphius would chart the flora and fauna of the eastern isles over the next fifty years, creating a cabinet of scientific curiosity filled with descriptions of indigenous plants, marine life and minerals that still ring true and sing with the voices of those who shared their observations – in Ambonese, Malay, Javanese, Makassarese, Chinese, Latin and Dutch – with a blind student who never saw his work in print and suffered the censor of his employers.

Shellfish soft and hard occupy two volumes of Rumphius' D'Amboinsche Rariteitkamer, which depicts many creatures familiar to explorers of the Sunda Shelf but bestows upon them names that pre-date the Linneaen Revolution. Among the menagerie of this cabinet are: Squilla Lutaria or the Mud Crayfish of the mangroves; Cancer Crumenatus, the Purse Crab that scales coconut trees; Cancer Saxatilis or Cattem Batu that is filled with "goodly meat"; the bentho-pelagic Cancer Marinus or Sea Crabs; the Sea Apple which Rumphius dubbed Eschinus Marinus Esculentus; Stella Marina Quarta which the author compares to a "hard, baked Pasty with black burned knobbles"; and the Cancelli or Cuman, "little crabs" that Rumphius likened to worms for their twisted tails.

Rumphius took to heart the culinary warnings of his informants, who saw danger in certain patterns. In one chapter, he detailed Cancer Floridus, an intertidal crab locals called Cattam Bonga for its shield, which appeared

"as if it were strewn with flowers: The Ambonese also call it Yu Nikimetten, because the ends of the Pincers are somewhat black, which is why they are counted among those, which Nature has marked not for eating, wherefore it is thought to be a smaller kind of the big Black Tooth [Etisus sp.], described hereafter in Chapter 19. They are not eaten, because the Natives consider it a common sign, that all Crabs, that have Pincers of which the claws are black or brown, are not fit to eat, as if they had been marked by Nature."

A similar word of caution is issued for the Cattam Tambaga, whose belly is

"marbled with red and white. One swears that this Copper Crab is very harmful, and therefore rarely appears in the light of day. It is smooth over its entire body, and shiny like porcelain."

While he was still able and sighted, Rumphius must have also stumbled, on rocky shoals off the village of Hitu where he was stationed, upon a crab he called Cancer Terrestris Tenui Testa or Cancer Rubris Oculis. He noted the crab's black-tipped pincers, but added that this Cattam Darat was sometimes consumed to dire ends.

"It happened in my day, in Hitulamma, that a Woman and her little girl ate nothing more than the Pincers of these Crabs, yet were found dead by the fire, with the pieces of the Crabs still lying next to them. Otherwise, the general antidote for all such Crabs, is scrapings of black Accarbahar, the root of Siriboppar; or Pissang Swangi, and of Lalan grass, either drunk, or chewed with Pinang, and the juice swallowed, which will expel this hurtful food by vomitting."

More than 300 years later, the same three crabs still roam the reefs of the Coral Triangle and its urban peripheries, lurching from pool to weedy pool when the moon tugs at the region and raises basins of coral around islands such as Jong. Rubble and rough waters surround this nubbin of a landmass, which is guarded by kites that float over its cliffs and hermit crabs that patrol a slope of coarse sand and curious pickings: cage nets, old pillows, fallen branches and the topmost ridges of a formation named after a ship that turned into stone.

During these few hours of blight, the xanthids tend to lie low, shuffling between cover as they graze or grapple with more difficult feed. The eriphiids – Rumphius' "Land Crabs" – on the other hand, seem to revel on the exposed flats. Smaller individuals may be found in breaks between large boulders or lurking in hollows that seem too high for aquatic life. Larger, at times gravid, specimens defend choice corners with both bark and bite. Not a few make the most of their ability to straddle the fine, fleeting line between danger and desire by entering fresh bodies of water to find fellow sea monsters that the tide has trapped and tackling these lesser beasts with teeth built to crush shell and scale. One red-eyed hunter had a toadfish in its grip as it sought to drag its catch into deeper parts. The prey was itself a predator, a devourer of benthic dwellers that was in the wrong place at the right time. For the crab, it was a bonanza of protein that was probably easier to crack than its usual meals that have to be crushed before consumption and eaten without prejudice as a source of nourishment and perhaps a dose of posthumous vengeance against those who might fail to heed the dark, dread hues of its claws.

12 January 2015

The far west of Singapore is a wasteland of industry, a wedge of long, straight roads that lead to nowhere in particular and have long run out of names, bearing instead digits and mind-numbing epithets: crescents, circles, loops, links, views, places, walks, circuits, sectors and squares in a flat and flattened corner of the island that shunned the city for as long as it could until the town beat a way to its shores and made an offer it could not refuse – a chance to be reborn, remade, reshaped, reclaimed as the engine of a nation and a cog in the transformation of a country from fortress to factory.

The far west of Singapore is a land forgotten by history, a long, ragged line of inlets and capes, rivers and estuaries, mangroves and mudflats, freshwater swamps and fringing reefs that fed and fuelled the residents of coastal settlements who looked away from the city and towards the straits, whose names were lost, reclaimed, buried, expunged as the town turned Jurong into a corporation and Tuas into a broad belt of wharves, yards and terminals. The headlands of Tanjong Gul, Tanjong Rawa, Tanjong Karang and Tanjong Merawang now rise only in expired maps, while Chichir, Kuching, Bajau, Blukang and Merawang have faded from charts and now float under tar and tanks, tracks and threads – isles with no names, no memory and no place in a country that refuses to be constrained by its past and its borders.

The only remnant of Tuas to survive untamed lies between a biochemical plant and a marina, and is marked by a starboard beacon erected on a rocky mound at the tip of a tongue of sand, mud and seagrass that runs northwards along a sea wall, fords the mouth of a storm canal and swells again to host a copse of mangroves, Avicennia and Sonneratia, around which fiddler crabs scour the silt for meals that arrive twice a day or not at all when the luminaries find themselves at odds with each other and temper the tide with their tiffs. Considerable stretches of this shore are littered with rubble, dead shells and skeletons that hint of richer depths or recall a time when the edge of this sea felt the lay of the land and the waters rose to soak, flood, probe, stroke, brush against the folds of hills, farms and forests, only to sink back again when the elements found no clear points of departure, no telling where one ends and the other begins, no lines to be drawn, no love between the lines.

Slippery filaments of blue-green algae cloak portions of the beach like a thin layer of greased hair with limp, unruly partings. The cyanobacteria appear to wax as the flat nears a break in the wall, the final destination of municipal discharges that emerge from a culvert by Tuas West Road and trace a straight, northwestward route to Merawang before a trickle and a sigh, as the waterway meets a grill with two tiers and sheds its burdens into a sallow trough. The lower edges of the canal, along with its floor and a row of bulkheads that guard its gap, are infested with tropical oysters that spare no hard surface below the high water mark and, like the microbial tufts that cling to softer rims, seem to revel in the sweet-savoury soup of rain, runoff and tidal incursions that steeps in this swale of fertile suspensions.

The higher reaches of Merawang are by and large a slope of raw particles, boulders and ridges, miniature ramparts and worn formations, surrounded by the remains of corals, clams and scallops, broken by porous fingers, soft green blades and carpet anemones – cracks, creases and cavities in chunks of loose rubble overrun by porcelain crabs and other filter feeders that prefer the dark side of every mound and slip away helter skelter when their world is overturned and tumbled out. The falling tide also reveals a terrace of pools fringed by algae and Halophila, and holding just enough water to cover the spires of shallow coils. An olive whelk ploughs through a bare patch, its long snout raised and tilted at possible sources of nourishment. Gangs of gold-spotted mudskippers play tag on the surf or cling to perches where the foam dashes against their flanks and washes the silt off their backs. The epibenthos is otherwise dominated by zoanthids, their crowns tucked in columns that perforate the shore with a minefield of squat, shrunken blobs, buttons to a magical mystery tour just a step away from a sinking feeling.

A small xanthid on a bed of pebbles gave in to the urge to budge, betraying itself and its neighbours: gobies that stuck their heads into hollows and an even tinier hermit that kept calm but refused to carry on. The crablet, identified as Leptodius sanguineus, bore somewhat spatulate fingers, miniature versions of the chelae welded by other, much larger beasts that lumber over reefs in the straits to the south. Though not uncommon at intertidal depths and having a range that spans the Red Sea and Hawaii, this crab is still rather poorly known, the possible artefact of an inconspicuous profile and cryptic habits; the animals tend to lurk in pieces of coral or bury themselves in the sediment. Reported to prey on small shellfish, the xanthids are themselves consumed by swimming crabs that encounter them in exposed positions and manage to crush their defences with brute, brachyuran force.

Stone crabs are far more visible bruisers, being probably more than a match for most portunids. Young individuals occupy the chambers of coarse rocks, while full-sized specimens peep from incomplete shadows and tight corners, which they grip with bulldog force and belligerent glares. Come dusk, the menippids emerge from their dens to taste the ground for stray snails and bivalves, whose shells they crack with a blunt, broad tooth on their major claw. Deliberate in nature and thoroughly indifferent to the rhythms that hold us captive to the hours, to the clock that fails to talk and to our singular fear of a temporality with no ends in sight, the crabs are unlikely to make a dent in the molluscan population, which still seethes with recruits from recent emissions into the thick, brown broth of a shuttered sea. This corner of the straits, the far west of an island in love with larger dreams, still strains against its walls, against the lines that seek to carve and conquer its waters, to turn the tip of the peninsula into a dry and promised land. But the sea may never rise again, save with a slow, warm wrath, for the time for trysts is over, and the city has turned its back, shut its eyes, buried its heart – this straits has shrunk and gulf has widened between two worlds too removed from each other, too close for comfort, too long apart.

05 January 2015

Insects, other than water-striders that surf on the open ocean and lice that suck the blood of seabirds and diving mammals, occupy a marginal position in marine ecosystems, where they are probably outflanked and kept at bay by the crustaceans that have long conquered every aquatic niche and more than match the Hexapoda in diversity of function and form. What passes for marine insects are largely confined to saltmarshes, mangroves, tidal pools, beaches and rocky shores, peripheral habitats shared and contested with isopods, beachfleas, coenobitids and brachyuran crabs that have learnt to roam beyond the surf but still regard the sea as an ally, a refuge, a nursery, a womb that restores and repossesses the spawn of its podigal children.

For arthropods too far removed in time to embrace the sea without a storm of misgivings, the littoral zones offer the worst of both worlds, a trade-off between the bounties of the deep and the safety of the shallowest end, an environment at once too wet and too dry, too forgiving and too demanding, where the ability to swim or fly is outweighed by a penchant for staying low, hanging tight and making the best of the hours between the tides. Insects have done fairly well in wetlands, but most adaptations for breathing in fresh water, such as spiracular tubes and regular trips to the surface, falter when the waters are too high and rocky for bugs to tap on the air supply. Intertidal insects thus rely on cutaneous respiration or gills called plastrons to survive as larvae; adults take to the wing or hide in cracks, recesses and shells offering pockets of air and protection from the waves.

Marine insects tend to be minuscule and fugitive, so encounters with the order during forays to reef and flat probably deserve more scrutiny and less dismissal as wayward explorers or victims of rogue winds. One such sighting took place at daybreak on the eastern fringe of Lazarus Island more than two years ago, en route to a lagoon built to be forgotten. A small beetle, little more than a third of an inch long, crept about a damp rock, in the company of nerites and periwinkles, with no sign of distress or displacement. The beetle was no stunner, but it was still a pretty thing with a black-blue lustre on its elytra and orangey basal antennae segments. The find was shot and stored until recently, when a smarter eye pointed to a genus named after the father of Oedipus, King of Thebes. Laius, which occurs from east Africa to the Asia Pacific, belongs to a family of coleopterans commonly referred to as soft-winged flower beetles, as terrestrial representatives usually feed on pollen and pollinators as adults.

Enlarged second antennae segments are male hallmarks of a number of malachiids, so the beetle was probably a female and superficially matches the description of Laius flavicornis, which has been recorded from the coasts of Java, Sarawak and China. The genus has been observed on rocky shores, under stones on beaches, and on "the surfaces of reefs" and other substrates subject to tidal inundation, and one species, aptly named submarinus, is said to inhabit "cracks and holes of sandstone that reach pretty far out into the sea, quite covered during the flood-tide but dry during the ebb." The beetles, which are likely to be scavengers or predators of other intertidal arthropods, evidently have ways of coping with periods of submersion, which they can endure for up to 30 hours, and colonising oceanic isles, on their own power or by clinging to natural rafts. But the secrets of these maritime midgets are still largely out of reach and lost in translation – cyphers on the margins of two worlds and nodes in the tree of life that will remain in bud until curiosity blooms and stirs a much closer look at what moves these bright little bodies on the thin edge of the blue.

02 January 2015

The roads of the lion city are dominated by hedges of camwood, an African treelet that probably gained traction with local planners for its leguminous ability to thrive in poor soil, the shy, undistractive flowers that never seem to set seed in this country, and a singular lack of character. The plant's high tolerance for regular pruning is a boon to estate managers who spare no effort in creating bland, green walls that separate pavements from parks and screen the street from the smart. The natural habit of Baphia nitida is markedly less tidy, however; left to its own devices, the shrub tends to explode in all directions with long, intrusive sprigs bearing dark, shiny leaves, and may even grow a trunk and attain its true height under a canopy of blight.

Strays are seldom allowed to mar the serenity of suburban fences, so every sapling that breaks the monotony of sanctioned thickets is removed with extreme prejudice by men who are also under orders to inspect the gutters that run alongside the hedges and slice off any shoots that peek out from the slopes. The ferns, vines and herbs that temper the harder edges of the heartlands suffer a cropping but they come back again and again with every breeze and storm that sends spores into the ditch and seeds down cracks and culverts, where they vex the efforts of councils on the warpath against untrimmed maladies.

The green reapers do miss a few spots that are hard to reach, easy to overlook or hidden between paths where few bother to stop and nobody gives a damn. One such recess, tucked in one of the busiest corners of a satellite town, ends by a deep monsoon trench as a grassy cul-de-sac fringed by camwood and ornamental gingers. Palmflies, day-flying moths, grass blues, chocolate pansies and small brown skippers rest on leaves between sips, changeable lizards guard the feet of rain trees, and bees – blue-banded as well as carpenter – work their way through the costus, unbugged by passers-by consumed by sweeter stuff. The vegetation also harbours a flutter of dragons: some use the shrubbery to recharge after flights of passion over a nearby pond, while others hunt from the safety of dense foliage until they gain the livery to make a play for open waters.

The farthest end of this nook also hides a wild cinnamon, barely visible among the camwood but still holding its ground against the onslaught of municipal blades to reach the height of its neighbours. The bushlet has also managed to weather the appetites of browsers, with perhaps a little help from parasitoid friends, but the odds evened out for at least one common mime fresh from its penultimate moult as a wingless grub and sitting smug on an exposed leaf. Having run a gauntlet of beaks, stings and bites for nigh ten days, the cat probably felt entitled to a breather and a break from its daily routine of hide and feed.

In its earlier stages, Chilasa clytia discourages predators by offering a passing resemblance to fowl poop, but the disguise probably wavers as the cat grows and crosses the line between excrement and enticement, from shit to sweet. By the fifth instar, protective mimicry has given way to trigger warnings that bring up the memory of off-flavours and bitter treats. The pre-pupal mime, a gaudy contrast to the greys, browns and greens of other local swallowtail cats, sports a streaky pattern of cream and pale black, with rows of carmine spots and bicoloured processes between the head and final abdominal segments.

The cat presented a chance to observe the later stages of its life-cycle, so its perch was plucked, rolled into a makeshift cocoon and shoved into a side pocket. It then spent the next four days in the safe haven of a clear plastic container, munching on young cinnamon leaves (picked from a largish tree by a quiet bend in a nearby neighbourhood), resting for hours at end to process its meals, and extruding copious pellets of frass that recall black peppercorns but consist of globules of undigested fibres. When molested, the cat readily everted an osmeterium from its prothoraic segment, creating the effect of a miniature kaiju as it reared up and issued silent screams of rage and odorous emissions accompanied by the thrashing-about of pudgy forequarters.

The cat put a halt to four days of surreptitious detours when it abandoned its feast and fury to take up a spot on a twig in its cage. After securing its butt to the bark and throwing a belt of silk around its back, the caterpillar entered a stupor that caught me off-guard, for it shed its skin during a mid-morning economic noodle run, by the end of which the larva no longer resembled a bug but the broken remains of a minor stump, albeit with an ill-disposed head capsule at its base. The pupa then dozed for nearly a fortnight before the imago emerged, again with infortuitous timing, to float around the desk and frustrate the other captive cat as it sought the sky beyond a wall of glass. There was a brief pause, for the record so to speak, then the mime found a crack in the screen and fled this high estate for a spell on the wing and sips of heaven in the gardens of a city on edge and in loathe with its drains.

28 December 2014

The city seems to fade as one sails further from shore. First, the towers lose their colours, turning pale blue and grey and merging into one another, a wall of steel, glass and fibre that separates the sea from the country that grew into it. Then the buildings become phantoms, a long, thin line of unresolved forms and irregular tidings, and for a while, the sky appears to reign over the town that tried to scrape it away, to hide the heavens behind its heights and reach for the stars without losing its fear of flying.

But the launch soon enters the confines of a different city, slightly less dense than the one grounded in illusion but still largely defined by the utility of every square mile, an archipelago of filled lands and reclaimed seas: factories, bunkers, cranes, berths, chimneys, smokestacks and crackers that labour under a thick, dark cloud of their own making. Once a passage of distance, a gateway to a middle earth between the far east and the furious west, the straits has shrunk as its reach has grown, as beaches and bays are buried under breakwaters and bunds, as the coast crawls out to engulf its shoals, and ships from three oceans now converge and compete to drop anchor by channels with little room for manoeuvre and no margins for error.

From their vessels, sailors from colder lands descend into workcraft that forward them to piers in the middle of nowhere, at the oddest of hours, to check out their bags and lose their bearings in long rides to town. These mariners will find a country where the sea has grown distant, its people detached and detained in high places, its fairways displaced and diverted to ports with few ways in and placed way too far and apart for citizens to remember what it's like to live on an island, to run from street to shore, to flee from the tide, to float on the waves, wade in the wrack and sleep with the sound of the wind in their beds.

The straits has shrunk as its isles rose in power and industry to devour their reefs and drive their children into exile, into unchartable territories where the flats have no fish and the sky is a hole in the wall, a space with a price but no sense of place. Reduced to roads, avenues and byways nourished by a link to an insatiable hinterland, the islands that guarded the straits have traded their spot in the sun for a world of strangers in a paradise lost to gain and razed from the memory of its makers. The islands where Singapore began are now footnotes and furnaces, plants and plots, the heartland of an economy built on the fringes of the lion city and sustained by an appetite for heavy fuel.

The islands where Singapore began have been pushed away and back, consigned to the very end of a country that is all at sea but never quite at home in waters that may be captured but refuse to be tamed. Every attempt to land on these remnants of a wetter age is thus fraught, a step into clear and prescient dangers and a surrender to the elements, to the mercy of freak storms, stray tides, bleak slopes and a moat of weed and rubble – the welcome mat to a field of dreams gone bad and to seed. Every approach to these banks is an exercise in caution, a glimpse into depths that peak without warning and graze the bottom of fragile craft with living glass and limestone, followed up clumsy flops and stiff lurches toward the highest, sometimes the only, rock in a basin of coral and sand, a pan of ripples in a near-forgotten corner of the straits where the sea still runs deep and true.

The reef offers no friendly faces, only greetings of shock and horror, splashes and tumbles, snaps and rustles, the shivers of a tailfin, the tip of a feeler, a gaze of reproach, a twitch, a bump, a sinking cloud of silt that betrays the fans of a buried ray. Schools of fish dash from pool to pool, then scatter to take their chances in random holes. Little terns float by, mewing and chattering; some land on low mounds while others plunge into pails of easy pickings. Swimming crabs, red from tooth to claw, guard every puddle and patch of weed, but happily ditch their posts to scramble over stone and sponge into thicker clumps. Only when cornered or caught flat-footed on a bare trap do they brandish their chelae and wave their spiny arms in a wide-eyed invitation to bite. The pose is not a bluff – the fingers are sharp and ready to nip and tug before the crab tucks one claw in and paddles away with the other in a dangle.

Herons, grey and sacred, make a bee-line for nearby shores where they can hunt and be harassed with impunity. Off the northern flank of Beting Bemban Besar, dredgers, barges and regional freighters work their way down Selat Pauh past the reefs of Pulau Hantu, while tankers assemble between Semakau and Pulau Senang, awaiting their turn to feed the refineries of Jurong. For an hour or more before sunset, the straits sank and its isles rose in power and majesty, laying bare the secrets of their keys and beckoning to islands that once or never were, skeletal outcrops of a warmer age that once welcomed women in boats who wore flowers in their tresses as they combed the flats, before they, too, fell silent and slipped off the mind of a nation with no heed for stories from its margins.

As the sky dimmed, the reef stirred and its residents took leave of their senses to choose their own adventures on a tropical shelf. Conches and volutes grub about the sediment, the former for detritus and the other for buried victims, whose detached halves also litter the middens of other bivalve fanciers. Cushion stars – big, blue and built like rock – lurk near the crest where the colonies are at their densest, where the builders dwell in cities of stone or emerge from porous layers to swing to the tune of the tide or star in a show of their own – crowns on thorns with the light of the sun at every tender tip. The reef may feed on solar energy but the real action takes place under dark, in coils and tunnels, under sand and inside rocks, in slippery hollows and unconsolidated deposits, where death comes in a million small doses and is a debt repaid in elements that find new takers – the makers of shells, tubes, cups, bones, claws and carapaces – and return to life at the foot of a long, fluid chain.

Before we fled for brighter parts, the reef offered one more, lesser, mystery. Small plops could be heard among the sargassum that draped the periphery, but there was little to suggest that the sound came from a splashing fish or snapping shrimp. The commotions, after a few false alarms and loops through the rubble, were traced to a small decapod, about an inch or more in length, that hovered in shallow water with its head tilted slightly down. The animal, which had prominent stalked eyes and a humped abdomen, maintained a broad zone of discomfort, so there were only the briefest of intervals between a sighting and a blink that sent the torch aflail into a fire of blank spaces.

The straits no longer sings, but it now rumbles with low, long groans that temper the senses and reduce every call and crash to a hum of muted resolutions. The 'shrimp' could thus cloak its flight in the whirl of shipyards and passing shafts, but it could have also simply steered towards unexpected corners, leaping against probable lines of movement into unlit patches a good few feet from its launch. But a few gave the game away by landing on clumps of sargassum with audible impact, having flicked themselves into a flop. Their jizz, supported by the natant habit and lack of prominently differentiated chelipeds, was penaeoidean, though the prawns showed none of their kin's bent for digging in when pressed. One specimen was then bagged before the reef began to rouse and stretch for the stars, both those that still haunt its banks and the luminaries that have faded as the city spread over the shore, only to find that the straits has grown nigh impassable and shines with such brightness that its beams stain the sky and do their best to keep goodnights forever at bay.